Willing to Sail

Only a shipwrecked person who has just escaped drowning could understand the psychology of someone who breaks out in laughter just because he is able to breathe.
-Kōbō Abe, The Woman in the Dunes

Image: Caspar David Friedrich, Seashore with Shipwreck by Moonlight, 1825-30 
Title: from John Macdonald's, A Naval, Military and Political Telegraphic Dictionary, Numerically Arranged on a Very Comprehensive Scale, 1817

A strange melancholy pervades me

     The tides are in our veins.

-Robinson Jeffers

Image: Ray K. Metzker, Pictus Interruptus

Title: Françoise Sagan, Bonjour Tristesse

I understand the language of waves

"Everything begins with a story."

-Joseph Campbell

Image: Erich Hartmann, Pair of shoes on deck, Carribbean, 1984
Title: Thanks to Le Testament d’Orphée (Testament of Orpheus)

The Endless Immensity of the Sea

"If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people together to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea."

-Antoine de Saint-Exupery 

Image: Akos Major

Eternity and it is Just as Flat and Wide

I see the world is flat and the map flat
that records it, and both page and world
speak each other forever. Put a fold
in eternity and it is just as flat and wide.
Take the map of the world and fold it
into a boat and the boat becomes the world.

-Dan Beachy-Quick from Spell 

[image: Johann Ruysch world map, 1507-1508]